I have spent thirty years in mainstream education as a student, a teacher and a parent. The fear I had shifting into an alternative education system at the beginning of the year was palpable. What if I hated it? Would I be able to transition back to mainstream in the future? I was stepping off the beaten track, way out of my comfort zone, and I was petrified.

Alternative schools offer a different educational philosophy to mainstream schools. They tend to be much smaller, learning is more individualised, and teaching can be more experimental. My school is located in a community centre, across two classrooms where we cater for twenty-four students. We teach only Stage 5 and are a fully accredited high school. The students have come to us, as mainstream education has not worked out for them for a variety of reasons. My day now includes driving the school bus, cooking lunch for them all and teaching across the curriculum.

I want to share with you the lessons that this shift in institutions has taught me. There is so much that mainstream schools can learn from alternative education.

Class Sizes – The work of John Hattie suggests that smaller class sizes don’t make much of a difference to student outcomes. However, the factors he does list as making a significant impact on student achievement would be much easier to focus on if class sizes were smaller. I have directly seen the benefits of smaller classes in my shift to alternative education. (Sorry Hattie!)

I have moved from seeing over 120 students on some days to seeing 24. I can intervene effectively when it comes to students with additional learning needs. I can provide richer and more immediate feedback because the marking I am doing does not take me 28000 hours to complete (Ok, slight over exaggeration!). Teacher / student relationships are richer as I only have to remember the interests and worries of 24 students. I have more time to plan, to evaluate, to scaffold. I know ALL the parents/carers of my students where I probably knew about 30% when teaching in mainstream. This is the reason many of our students seek out alternative education. They are getting lost and forgotten in over-populated classes. Although a costly exercise, class sizes need to be reduced. For schools located in disadvantaged areas this is even more significant.

Burn The Paperwork – Paperwork is making our teachers sick and about 85% of it is not necessary. Shifting to alternative education really highlighted to me the amount of unnecessary work teachers are asked to do in mainstream schools. In my current school if NESA isn’t going to ask for it at the end of the day, then we don’t do it. If it doesn’t serve our students learning, we don’t do it. For example, each term the parent/carer signs a blanket permission note covering basically any school excursion we might chose to run that term. We also have prewritten risk assessments for pretty much any activity. That way when I see my students aren’t engaged in their wetland case study in Geography, I can literally pile them into a bus and take them to a wetland without having to complete a few hours of paper work and obtain permission from four people above me to do so. I get that this will never be quite this simple in mainstream, but it can definitely be simpler. Another example would be assessment tasks. In most schools where I have previously taught their has been so much unnecessary garbage required on the assessment sheet that students have difficulty finding what they have to do. However, someone of importance deems that a school-wide pro-forma needs to be followed because it justifies their job. Does the pro-forma really make a difference to the students work? Nope, so get rid of it! Trust me, it is liberating.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Should Be The Priority – If you are not familiar with Maslow you need to be. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) is a five-tier model prioritising what needs must be met for an individual to ensure motivation and self-actualisation. We know, as teachers, that self-actualisation is necessary to become an independent learner. However, mainstream schools often fail to recognise that a students physiological needs, safety needs, sense of love and belonging and esteem need to be in place in order for students to be motivated to learn. While advocating for additional mental health supports for a student of mine in a mainstream school I was told by my school leader to “separate the emotion from the curriculum”. Essentially what she was saying is just teach the content and forget about this nonsense.

Education providers need to recognise that the two cannot be separated, that learning cannot take place if wellbeing is not the number one priority. If a student feels bullied, or has issues with their friendship group, they will not be able to learn properly. If a student hasn’t eaten or their clothes are not clean, they will not be able to learn properly. If a student lacks self-esteem and respect for themselves, they will not be able to learn properly. My new school not only recognises this, but acts on this. Many of our student’s basic needs were not being met when they attended mainstream high school resulting in low attendance, poor behaviour and in many cases suspensions. Our students are now able to learn and are attending school because their basic needs are being met.

Tear Down The Silos – Mainstream schools tend to have a very silo approach to education. For example, let’s take Mrs Fraction a hypothetical teacher in a mainstream school. Mrs Fractions teaches maths. She hangs out with the maths faculty. Maths takes place four periods a week in the same classroom. The only thing that is taught in Mrs Fraction’s class is maths. The classes are streamed etc. Sound familiar?

In my school I now teach across the curriculum. I teach geography, English, PDHPE, and arts. I am continually making rich cross-curricula links. I team-teach frequently with my peers. Project-based learning has a priority in our week with students choosing what they wish to work on. Furthermore, every morning and afternoon we are working as a team updating each other on what is working or not working for each student and problem solving any challenges that may arise. This is 21st Century teaching and learning in action, but I know what you are thinking - this isn’t practical for mainstream schools! Maybe not, but it isn’t impossible. Finland did it. Singapore has made massive changes in this area. We need to rethink our approach.

Play Is Important – Just like paperwork is making our teachers sick, so too is the removal of play from our schools. Where is the time for laughter and joy in our overcrowded, over assessed curriculum? Many of our students come to us sick. Yes, sick – depressed, anxious, even suicidal. There are many factors at play here, but I believe mainstream schooling is a large contributor to this. Play, fun and time for stress-free connections need to be embedded in the teaching week. I am not talking about a once-a-term lunchtime concert or fundraising mufti day, I am talking about significant time for fun and renewal at least once a week. At our school we watch our students and staff carefully. When we can see they are tired and drained we change it up. For example, one of our favourite things to do is go to a small reserve by the lake. We take fishing rods and a picnic lunch. Some students will sit on blankets under the trees creating art works or using natural materials for craft. Others will take a stroll over a small bridge to a little island to collect wild flowers. A game of soccer, cards or even a fishing competition may take place. Last time we had an epic game (staff and students) of forty-four homes on the island. We laughed so hard as we tried to make it home. These days renew us all – staff and students.

And guess what… the world does not end. Subject hours are still met, outcomes are still covered, and best of all our students become a little less broken each time we do it.

Community Connectedness – When was the last time your school really connected with the community? I am not talking about parents and friends, I am talking about the whole community. Teenagers often feel isolated within the community especially those in lower socio-economic areas. It is important that students are given the opportunity to connect with their local community, not only for their benefit, but also for the benefit of all. Students learn to empathise with others of different ages and feel personal self-worth when they are able to contribute to society. Additionally, community members will have more time for your students and limited perceptions of a particular generation can shift.

Once a week we partake in community activities. These involve assisting at the RSPCA, feeding the elderly at the local community centre, participating in random acts of kindness, working with playgroups and primary schools, or visiting local business such as farms to improve their understanding of a particular topic. The personal growth I see in my students through participating in these activities are profound. We also have many volunteers come and work in our school. People of different ages, social status and cultures volunteer their time to support our students. The students learn through these unique relationships developing new mentors and feeling a bigger sense of connection, support and belonging through their teenage years.

I am not saying that mainstream schools are doing things wrong, but I do want to highlight that it is not the only way. John Dewey once said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself”. This is what I feel has shifted for me through this transition. I am no longer teaching my students the skills they need for life, I am walking the journey of life with them… albeit off the beaten track.

This week I had the privilege to present at an Alternative Schools Conference at Warakiri College on Project-Based Learning with one of my fantastic colleagues, John Martin. We are experimenting with cross-curricula project-based learning in our school context and our first major project has been The Archibull Prize. I would love to share some aspects of this case study here in hope to inspire you to consider the implementation of PBL in your classroom.

What is project-based learning?

The Buck Institute defines project-based learning as “a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.” (Buck Institute, 2018).

What is The Archibull Prize?

The Archibull Prize is an innovative program providing students with the opportunity to engage in agriculture. Through the project students “meet young farmers and engage in genuine farm experiences, gain knowledge and skills about the production of the food they eat, fibres they use and the environment they live in.” (Archibull, 2018) The program involves three elements – the design of a life-sized fibreglass cow based on the theme ‘Feeding, Clothing and Powering A Hungry Nation Is A Shared Responsibility’; a reflective blog; and a multimedia animation / infographic.

Ron Ritchhart (2009), author of Making Thinking Visible and co-author of Creating Cultures of Thinking, identifies four criteria that are useful in shaping classroom activities to more effectively promote the kinds of authentic intellectual engagement that leads to deep understanding.

Ritchhardt claims that the more prevalent these criteria are in a learning opportunity, the more powerful the learning opportunity will be for the students involved. He has designed a simple scale on which teachers can measure their learning opportunities against. You can find this here.

How did The Archibull Prize measure up as an authentic intellectual learning opportunity?

Novel Application - Novel application comes in bucket loads in this project. Our students hadto use higher order thinking to complete the three tasks asked of by the project including the artistic design of the cow, the blog and multimedia animation. The direct question is or the problem they had to solve is – How can we artistically represent the current climate of agriculture in Australia?

Meaningful Inquiry - In order to solve the question above our students had to delve into many aspects of sustainability and agriculture in Australia. They examined careers in agriculture, climate change, biosecurity, food security and much, much more. They did this both in the classroom and on the farm.

Effective Communication - This project encouraged students to share their learning in a variety of ways. They had to reflect on and share their learning through the blog. They had to articulate deep understanding in the multimedia production, and furthermore each time someone new sees their cow our students launch into explaining the many elements of their design.

Purposeful Reach - For me this is the key to effective PBL. It raises the steaks for students. Students need the opportunity to present their work to someone other then myself or their classroom peers. In every instance that I have worked on a project with purposeful reach, the quality of work has significantly risen. This is a competition. They want to be competitive. This image here sums up the reach this project has had. Their multimedia production has been shared in a number of forums including the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. Suddenly, our marginalised students, living on the fringe, have a voice across our nation.

How do we connect PBL within the curriculum?

Many teachers shy away from PBL and cross-curricula projects as they are unsure how to document or measure it against syllabus outcomes with formal assessment. However, there are multiple solutions to this problem. Firstly the advantage of choosing a competition generally means there are already teaching resources and pre-established links. This is definitely the case with The Archibull Prize with a number of resources available through the website across key learning areas. Most competitions will also have an assessment criteria that can be modified to formally assess the project either individually or as a group. We chose, due to the experiential nature of this project, not to make this a formal assessment, but in hindsight I wish we had because the evidence of learning was substantial.

When programing cross-curricula PBL I sit with all the outcomes across all subject areas I wish to cover, and I look at what outcomes I need to meet and want to meet that connect with the project. In this instance The Archibull Project covered both Geography and English outcomes. However, The Archibull Project could form the basis of any art, agriculture, design and technology, industrial technology, or even photography and media unit. As long as you program it effectively, identify and incorporate the outcomes you wish to cover and collect formal evidence of learning, you can easily embed a program like this into your scope and sequence.

Which PBL model should you follow?

Usually I work from the Buck Institute model for PBL but in this instance I chose the solution fluency model to map out my approach and structure the unit. I chose this model as I felt it was simplistic and well-fitted to what I wanted to achieve. The Essential Fluencies are outlined extensively in the book ‘Mindful Assessment’ (Crockett, L. & Churches, A. (2016) Mindful Assessment, published by Solution Tree. (See also ‘Solution Fluency’, Global Digital Citizen Foundation website.) The six phases of the solution fluency include:

Define – The define phase involves capturing students attention through the definition of the problem at hand. In our project this occurred through an entry event that involved a virtual reality beef bus. Students were able to witness the production of beef by virtually visiting the farm and following the production of beef from the paddock to the plate.

Discover – The discover phase involves asking questions and thoroughly investigating the problem at hand. In our project this took place through guided inquiry in our classroom and through two farm visits, one with our farming mentor and another at a local chemical-free farm. The discover phase can take place both inside and outside the classroom.

Dream – The dream phase is the time in which students apply higher order thinking to solve the problem. They dream up ideas and solutions that stem from the basis of their learning. No ideas is too silly, too big, too hard. Once all the solutions have been dreamt up, students go about selecting the best possibilities to further explore in the design stage.

Design – In the design phase students work together to plot out the details of their solutions. In our project this involved detailed discussion, draft designs, written symbolic ideas and mind mapping.

Deliver – There are two components of this phase – production and presentation. For our students this involved the production of the multimedia element, the construction of the blog and the painting of the cow. The students then find a way to present this to the community. In our case students presented the blog online, shared their multimedia production through social media and have presented their cow for judging in the competition.

Debrief – This is an opportunity to ‘revisit, review, and reflect’ on the process. The Archibull Prize provides both entry and exit surveys for students to complete which provides an opportunity to debrief. Furthermore, we have reflected with our students and reflected ourselves by presenting our learning at The Alternative Schools conference.

What were the challenges?

​These are the challenges identified with my colleague and fellow presenter John Martin.

The delivery of the program and lessons for our students was no harder than the delivery of any learning we may offer. However, we are a small school and we don’t have an art department, agriculture department, a separate department for sciences or a department for TAS. As such we had limited resources and staff experience available when working through the practical aspect of the project. In saying that, it allowed us to turn to the community and encourage our students to develop a culture of thinking within our school.

The second challenge relates to the students level of learning and inquiry. Our students are in Yr 9 and Yr 10 and so they should be able to analyse, rethink, and synthesise yet, as so many of our students have experienced trauma and extended absences from school, we found that many their abilities spanned a wide range which required carefully replanning and differentiation for us. This included the careful selection of individual roles and scaffolded tasks.

The final challenge was to encourage our students to appreciate and understand that no matter the outcome, they could not fail. Our students come to us having experienced trauma, and a sense of shame and failure derived from words told to them in the past and actions they’ve experienced in their lives. Overcoming this sense of shame and failure is perhaps one of the hardest challenges we faced. Students were sacred to ‘mess up the paint’ or have a go in case they failed. Our responsibility was to work with them and say “It is totally fine! Let’s problem solve this together.”

What was the impact of the project?

Not only do we have to give students in our schools the opportunity to fail, we need to give them the opportunity to succeed. I have found it difficult to put into words the impact this project has had on our students but I will begin with authentic intellectual engagement. For the first time, pretty much all year if I am honest, my students were 100% actively participating in authentic intellectual work. The evidence of learning expressed by not only the cow, but also the multimedia project and the blog is substantial. I can guarantee that next year my students couldn’t tell you a thing about the novel we studied in a traditional sense this term but they will be able to tell you where potatoes come from, what products are made from beef, the impact of climate change on our farmers and one particular student now knows exactly where calves come from and is happy to share this newly found knowledge with anyone that will listen. There is complex thinking in this cow.

Secondly, the most profound impact I have seen in this project has been the collaboration, connectedness and belonging that this cow has brought to our school. Believe me people - a giant fibreglass cow WILL bring your school community together. The cow has lived in my classroom for two terms. Before school I would have students gathered around it asking when we working on the horns, and questioning how we were going to problem solve the window. This discussion would continue to lunch. At times we would have eight or more people working around the cow, engaged in conversation, growing relationships and painting, one stroke at a time, the perfect picture of community.

In a speech presented at our school open day this year one of our students said, “We are the students that are known as stuff ups, won’t amount to anythings, failures” but then he articulated school was the one place where they weren’t seen like this. We made it our mission as a school to change this perception, one cow at a time, and we did. Now our students, who would never have seen their work hung on the walls of mainstream classroom are being celebrated in the local newspaper, agricultural journals and many other community based forums…. and they have never been prouder.

Conclusion

I would highly recommend The Archibull Prize as a starting point to introduce cross-curricula PBL into your teaching program. Lynne Strong, founder of The Archibull Prize, is an incredible support and I know she will assist you and your school to implement the program in the best way possible.